How did the rabbis of Roman and Byzantine times imagine the order of the world, and what registers of reality did they operate with? To answer this question, we won’t turn to cosmogonic narratives, as we might expect, but to legal texts from the Babylonian Talmud. Several passages are likely to provide us with elements of an answer, from which we have chosen two: on the one hand, the folios that regulate the construction of the roof of the ritual hut of Sukkot (beginning of tractate Sukka) and, on the other, the folios that seek to define the notion of soil and ground (Avoda Zara 45b-46a). In both cases, rabbinic discussions deconstruct notions that may seem intuitive but are only so in surface terms: this applies, for example, to objects such as mountains, pebbles, branches and trees, but also to boards and statues. This demonstrates that the rabbis of Late Antiquity were not interested in “sectorial” taxonomies, and did not conceive of general charts of plants, animals or stones. On the other hand, the rabbis of the Talmud were very sensitive to the natural-artificial distinction, since it was this distinction that guided the establishment of ritual practices and, more generally, legal decisions (halacha). In this way, based on an analysis of the above-mentioned passages, we will highlight the tripartite taxonomy of reality that characterizes rabbinic thought: a) the register of minerals and the living, b) the register of entities originating from second but non-human causes, c) the register of artifice.
Mishnah Shevuot 2:2 describes (or constructs) a processional ritual for expanding the Temple’s temenos. It includes a non-descript “song” (shir). In commenting on this part of the ritual, Bavli Sheuvot 15b presents a baraita that lists the contents of this shir, which includes numerous psalms and a liturgical unit called the shir shel pegaim. The stam (and a late amora in a somewhat parallel passage in Yerushlami Shabbat) identifies this unit as Psalm 91. Based on this identification, modern scholars have typically assumed that Psalm 91 was already understood by this moniker in the Second Temple period. Such is possible. But it reads history backward. I argue that it is more historically plausible that shir shel pegaim referred to an exorcism poem that continued to circulate in the late ancient period. The baraita and its Yerushalmi parallel preserve mention of such a work. Magical texts live long lives. The localization of shir shel pegaim as Psalm 91 (and possibly also Psalm 3), I argue, belongs to a larger rabbinic reading strategy, a canon-bound consciousness that narrowed most pre-rabbinic sources of authority to the Bible alone.
In the course of the discussion of the laws of mourning in the third chapter of BT Moed Katan, the stam repeatedly invokes rabbis' near kin: the text is replete with not only stories of rabbis mourning their own relatives' deaths, but also seeming asides as to the kinship relations between rabbis in the midst of legal discourse. What is the relationship between these stories, rabbinic law on mourning, and the role of the rabbi as both legal authority and private individual? How does the rabbinic conception of kinship shape their understanding of loss? Drawing on both contemporary anthropological theories of kinship and mourning, as well as a literary analysis of these stories and their parallels in the rabbinic canon, this paper will explore the role of relatedness in the rabbinic imagination, and how it shapes the rabbinic approach to death and loss.
